Cultbytes

Karl Lagerfeld. Chanel Haute Couture, Autumn/Winter 2015–16. I have only ever cried in a museum once. I wish I could say it was in front of a painting or sculpture, but no. It was while viewing a dress by Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel at the 2023 Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty, curated by the head of the Costume Institute, Andrew Bolton.

Astrid Kajsa Nylander. Photographed by Märta Thisner. Courtesy of the artist. Imagine the most delicious shade of pink: somewhere between chewing gum and pale coral. It runs through Astrid Kajsa Nylander’s Set, appearing in works such as Fris, Runda, Set#1, and Raumtrenner. The colour feels both immediate and in flux, and if one were to take a bite of it, it would taste like cotton candy. In Set, painting becomes a space where games, probability, and everyday perception overlap.

Francisco Correa Cordero, 2023. Photographed by Carolyne Lorée Teston. On August 2, Francisco Correa Cordero, the founder of the downtown New York gallery Lubov, died at a hospital in Manhattan, at the age of 37. His passing was announced by the gallery’s Instagram account the following day; it did not state the cause of death but described it as “peacefully surrounded by what he loved most – his chosen family, laughter, and so much love.” Cordero opened Lubov in 2016 in Tribeca.

Ross Collab. “Lovers, Floating,” 2025. 35mm film photograph printed on archival paper. 20×16 in. Courtesy of the artist. Earlier this summer, my friend Kyle Quinn, artist and the founder of publishing house Raw Meat Collective, told me of a group show he would be exhibiting in at the Bronx River Art Center. A queer group exhibition revolving around identity, personhood, and how queerness is not one-size-fits-all, I immediately put it on my calendar to attend.

Rain Chan. “Boundary Beasts,” 2026. Concept renderings for the Hong Kong Palace Museum. Courtesy of the artist. From documenting fictional U.S. presidents to the internet, “other” categories, double vision, train stations, and an upcoming exhibition at Hong Kong Palace Museum to “all hell breaking loose” as the chocolate mousse made its entrance this conversation took place over dinner at French chicken rotisserie Bed-Stuy haunt BADABOOM between two friends.

Arnold Rosenberg. Marcel Duchamp playing chess, 1958. Courtesy of Digital Souls. The French artist Marcel Duchamp famously gave up art to play chess. Meandering through the Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), I wondered whether it was not Duchamp who abandoned art, but art that had given up on Duchamp first. As I entered the show, a family ahead of me shuffled, as though they had just driven in from the American Midwest.

Life drawing class, 1940s. Photographer unknown. Naked bodies. Nudes. Throughout their training, every artist spends countless hours looking at, observing, and depicting unclothed figures of every conceivable shape and size. Entire afternoons can disappear while one painstakingly renders the shadow around a nipple, or the precise anatomy of the cleft between the buttocks. The idea being that if you can draw the human body, the hardest shape of all, you can draw everything.

Carol Rama. “Dorina (Appassionata),” 1943. Watercolor, tempera and coloured pencils on paper. 24 x 10 cm. Photographed by Thomas Barratt © Archivio Carol Rama. Courtesy the Estate of Carol Rama, Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi and Hauser & Wirth. “Radical figure. Maverick. Ferociously Nonconformist. Censored.” The opening wall text at Hauser & Wirth introduces Carol Rama with some of these all too familiar words.

Ivana Dama. “Echoes of Urgencies.” Photographed by Oresti Tsonopoulos. Courtesy of the artist and The Immigrant Artist Biennial. The Immigrant Artist Biennial has announced that eighteen artists and one organization will present work in their third edition, opening in October 2026, and titled Identity Card.

Jane Swavely. “Not Yet Titled,” 2026. Courtesy of Magenta Plains. Nothing is real. And nothing to get hung about. Jane Swavely’s newest body of work an explosion of smeared and stroked oil paints, a play on transparency and opacity, gestures and traces. These works are visceral and OTT—like a trip—there is so much to see in each of them. Yet, traces within them draw us back to reality—Strawberry Fields has a bootprint on its upper middle, “a vintage Prada boot from the 90’s,” she explains.